Did we leave him in the garden? Did we leave him in the Grove Street Cemetery?
The day we have packed the car, turned the key, and are leaving town, we’ve planned to visit the cemetery but are delayed at a doctor’s appointment. The cemetery closes. Mr. Cameron, who has been the caretaker forever and is probably ninety years old, comes at six a.m. seven days a week and closes the gates at three forty-five.
“It’s okay,” Simon says, to Solo’s and my upset. “If we can’t leave now, we can never leave.”
And then he says, “The grave reminds me of Daddy’s death, but I want to remember Daddy’s life.”
I tell them no one, not even I, can tell them when or how often they should visit their father’s grave.
For the gravestone, we’d picked red India marble, from which we also had a bench made. I was aware, as we picked the bench, that the site was a double plot where one day my children would bury me next to their father. We picked one of his painting’s wide-eyed, neo-Coptic angels and the engraving artist etched it onto the stone. On the other side are etched Ficre’s words, from a small painting he made for our bedside: “I wake up grateful, for life is a gift.”
“Oh beauty, you are the light of the world!” was the quotation we chose for the bench by the side of the grave, from a poem by Derek Walcott my teacher, whose words Ficre and I revered. The exaltation with which we met, and beauty itself, the thing we both chased and tried to re-create in our work, that which lights the world and its darkness that he understood so well. The poem says it better than any scripture.
Beauty is the beloved, and beauty is beauty itself, in its natural form and as made.
Ficre’s paintings work from natural beauty—so many boats on the water, so many horizons—but also from a profound imaginative space. There, the shadow of a fish, but an impossible fish, going against the tide, in its own inexplicable direction. Ficre went his own way, made his own course.
As I sit alone with these words, I think about how brave he was in so many ways, and how brave he was to go into that studio every day with his demons and his angels, and labor to put them on canvas. Nulla dia sine linea, No day without a line, is the motto at the Art Students League, from Pliny the Elder, derived from the Greek painter Apelles. The devotions.
While packing I find photographs that he took. His camera lingers on an eight-year-old boy’s hand, zooms in closer so we can see the words in the book the nine-year-old is reading, which is The Borrowers. The landscape out the window on a family sojourn zooms by, blurs, like this all does, but with flashes of sharp clarity. He looks closer at the hand so now he shows us the pores. He loves his wife’s red pocketbook and red suede gloves. He takes pictures of the graves of the great Russian artists buried in Venice: Igor Stravinsky, Serge Diaghliev, Jospeh Brodsky. He keeps looking, keeps taking pictures, and with each, his intimacy deepens. There is another picture of one of the boys’ math books, a close-up of a page. It starts with a word problem: “Anna purchased three yards of fabric.” And then the numbers, and the markings made fascinating by his camera.
He probably played those numbers. Yes, he loved the lottery. The last days of his life he was agitated about the lottery, kept saying he had to win it for me, leapt up to go buy more tickets and sat working their magic.
And what did Ficre see in me? Why did he come sit next to me and talk to me in the café that day? I’d just cut off all my hair, hair that went well past my shoulders; I started fresh; I was newly mown; my head belonged only to him. Time stretched and stretched; I went to him and then stayed.
I learned about Eritrea, the little country that could, and then we mobilized in the border wars of ’98, did as much as we could, took in relatives.
Reading about a mother chef whose daughter becomes a chef, I think about taste and how it is developed, but is also as particular as sexual desire. How does what we like develop? The particular biology of the point at which my back breaks into sweat, or how I like to be touched, is as idiosyncratic as how much salt you like. Ficre did not salt, proudly. Simon loves salt, eats it, like my mother, who eats a whole bag of potato chips on the way home from the store. Ficre’s hand on his mother’s elbow at the stove, tipping the clarified butter ladle so more goes in the pot. More, more. How his body was made, how it broke down or did not break down fats. He developed cholesterol on blueberries and yogurt, even as his wife did not while eating high on the hog.
High cotton. We lived in emotional high cotton for a while.